Opportunities for coming season, what are their affects and are opportunities really have affect?

New season is coming. Booking.com send to our object a lot of opportunities to boost business results. One of them is common for June, July, September. We have an option to make a 15% off on our best selling rooms and apartments. Can someone say what is good sides, affects or even does this opportunity have affect on guests to make a lot of reservations? It is one way of competition in prices for season between renting objects. Does this opportunity with 15% (season offer) off really working?

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Thanks for the post, I like the topic of the Oppertunities Booking.com gives us.

Well, I believe that Booking.com puts a tag on your property so that people can see you are running a special. I can't visibly see the tag when I go look, and also I can't see for which dates my special is running. (I obviously know what dates are included but my question is How does a guest know?).

I was thinking of registering myself as a guest on Booking.com so that I can receive their newsletters etc because the Oppertunities say that your property gets tagged in the newsletter also.

Thank you so much for the comment. I also think that Booking.com puts a tag on our property for the guests to see us like a object with special offer for them. For this season offfer with 15% off I see a little image on our object.

The reasonable question is does guests knows about this special offer and how? I didn't know that our property is tagged in the newsettler. That is very interesting fact and very important for me.

We are renting very big apartment. Two bedrooms, toliet, kitchen, dining room, living room and closed terrace - about 125m2. If I put lower price, that kind of business is not profitable for us. Because you have to pay promission for Booking.com, local and country taxes, electricity, gas, water resources and equipment in the apartment. I think then is better to put higher price and reduce them with this season offer, 15% off.

I'm super glad to hear you can see the tag. For some reason I'm unable to spot it. You can't maybe take a screenshot of the tag and what it looks like? Using the snipper tool perhaps.

I know what you mean. Sometimes it's just not worth giving that 15% off, but you also don't want to lose out because all the other properties in the area are running the special except you. So it's kind of... a rock and a hard place.

I make screenshot of our season offer. We are fisrt one on the apge and I hope you can see icon with the label Sezonska ponuda on Croatian ( on english is Season offer). I think this is the key point in that type of opportunities. Guests can see this offer on page and it can attract them to make reservation.

Thanks! Very helpful, I've played with the specials now (removed them all and added them again and they now work!.

I appreciate it. Would have never thought that I needed to re-add it.. also i was signed into my extranet and then went and did the search which didn't show the True Booking.com website like the guest sees.

Your listing is on the top due to you view your listing before this and Booking.com will pin the last viewed listing at top. It will be more accurate if you search your area by Google Chrome incognito windows. You may find your listing on other page.

Thanks a lot for respond. I know understand that, if you have good grade you will be on the higher position on the list of accomodation objects. If you give the Booking.com higher comission (16,17 or even 18%), that means that Booking.com will put you on the higher position. A lot of interested guests, more reservations. I know understand that is very simple rules for the reservations and success in this business.

Thanks a lot for comment of our success. 9.9 is results of hardworking job with the guests.

Thank you so much for your comment which was very interesting and helpful.

I am delighted that my advise and my example helps you! I think that is sense of this forum to help each other in a lot of cases. You have a lot of experience and you will help me and other forum partners, and we know something that help you.

I have an idea that you maybe have to re-add your opportunity, but I wasn't sure 100%.

We now solved one problem and have smart conclusion! I don't have enough experience in this job, but I'm trying to learn a lot and give my best to help other people what I know!

I hope we will have enough reasons to communicate again! Thanks a lot for a help!

Hello, We are working with booking for about 6 yrs. now. This 2018 since starting the sales are the worst. We already, reduce prices lower than we sold in 2014. So very much lower than the competition. Increase the service, Increase the comission to Bookingcom, The question is: Why the sales are so low? Why I don't see from Bookingcom the same push of publicity like the competition is doing on TV? It is because the World socker game?. Every body is in Rusia?. Some ideas to increase the sales?

Promotions, specials, discounts, a catch 22!... My Channel Management System (Nightsbridge) allows us to have a direct interface with most OTAs giving us a good "billboard effect" or in other words a good presence on the web. Having said that, one must be very cautious when creating specials, especially if you're on more than one OTA.

Every large OTA uses algorithm to check your pricing and if you happen to be cheaper on any other channel than theirs, you go down their ranking. They use TripAdvisor mostly. Search for your property and have a look for yourself.

Now comes the specials. Some OTA are more creative than others and more user friendly. Bkg.com is most probably the best for that. Why would you want to create a special? Well, most probably it's because you are on a seasonal market and you are trying to boost your bookings. And this is where the catch is! Being very seasonal in Cape Town, we are bound to feel a nice drop in our sales in our winter (Jun-Sep), so I am just wondering if offering specials will just drop the very little income we get in winter.. Specials we do, but that often leaves us with as little as 50% gross revenue, meaning an even smaller net margin (15% VAT + 15% commission + 15% additional special + etc....).

I was also over the moon, when I saw my listing on top of the BKG.com page. I thought I was being so clever in offering BKG.com a higher commission, thinking it would push me to the very top. But like Yew Bh said, it's only because I kept on checking on my listing, thus being identified by BKG.com as a potential guest, hence my top position. Try from another computer...

The bottom line is that there's lots of competition out there, and we are in a very challenging industry. We're all trying to get the most of our business, but some external factors are difficult to curb. Be it the seasonality, new immigration rules (like the birth unabridged certificate for minors entering RSA), weather (with unfortunately too famous "Day Zero" water saga in Cape Town), economy, political uncertainty, etc... So I don't know if any discount or special would in fact attract more bookings, or like I said just shoot ourselves in the foot, hindering even more the little revenue we're getting...

Wishing you a wonderful Sunday. Here it's sunny in CPT, reaching up to 22deg today. Best regards / Yves

From my observations booking.com is great to get visibility. Thats usually where it stands!

The struggle for booking.com and us as owners is, holding the guests to honour the bookings.

Ie: once booked on booking.com (not prepaid), the local guides picks these guests up at the train/bus stations and allures them to another location where they will make a buck on the side. Resulting in booking.com and owners losing business opportunity. We all put money into getting the guests down to the destination but some one else profits from it."

What we must ask as owners of businesses is,

A) What are the guarantees that we get by joining the OTA's? Yes we pay commission when the guests turn up, but when they don't turn up and we have blocked the rooms for the guests, who is responsible for the loss of business?

How can we as owners find a way to ensure that the OTA's provide the owners with the service/accountability we need as a client to the OTAs just as much as we as owners try to accommodate providing services for the OTA's and guests on an ongoing basis.

The opportunity lies where ensuring the guests honour booking.com "bookings". This way booking.com as well as business owners can have a win win situation.

My experience mirrors Sam's. When the guests cancelled or no-show and there is a charge based on our policy, often times we still are not able to collect payment for rooms that would otherwise be booked, maybe not on booking.com but by other booking sites. This is because (a) the credit card declined (b) cannot process payment ,or (c) guests do not respond to messages or calls regarding confirmation of reservation, arrival time etc. I believe some guests deliberately restrict their cards so as not to be charged cancellation fees. This is grossly unfair to us as host because we are losing business and although Booking.com state that they will pay for cancellations if reservation not replaced, it is not happening. Further, Booking.com has a habit of sending out emails to guests about free cancellation and that rates got cheaper in area etc. This is very bad for business because this has resulted in high levels of guest cancellations when guests realize that another property has offered a cheaper rate than they reserved for.

It is really a challenge to keep up with Booking.com offering the guest everything from free cancellation to fee waiver, while host properties are left unable to collect from guests who just simple don't show up and restrict their credit card from being charged. I appreciate it if a guest request cancellation in an emergency situation or have to cancel because of circumstances beyond their control and this is communicated to us.

Maybe this doesn't affect owners with large amount of rooms, however, we only have 3 rooms and certainly can't afford to have the rooms tied up when they could have been booked by other serious guests.

I am sorry but I don't think business owners are getting the required support needed from Booking.com. A better system of securing payment is required, credit cards do expire as well as we can only view card information for 10 days. What about reservations that are made for example 6 months in advance, how do we retrieve card information? What is the risk of us having the guests card information stored manually Versus being able to retrieve such from the extranet on request?

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